1-How long have you been writing?
I have been writing for Double Dragon
Publishing since 2010. Prior to that, I
had been published in the occasional literary magazine. I am oddly popular in small pockets in
Canada.
2- What is your
favorite genre to write?
I am still smitten with writing contemporary
fantasy, since I feel I have at least four more books in the Night’s Dream
series to write. Two may be combined,
but I can’t yet escape this world I've created quite.
I also enjoy writing nonfiction based upon my
life, most of which I post in between reviews and articles about writing at my
website http://xenex.org. I
have always imagined writing a comic novel with my family as its foundation –
somewhere between the movie The Royal
Tennebaums and the work of David Sedaris – but I have yet to happen upon a
way I can manage it without being disowned.
3-What are you working
on now?
I am on the home
stretch of the first draft of my fourth book in the Night’s Dream series. Eighty-five thousand words in and I think I
have just found the right title. It is
ambitious, in that it is more complex than my prior three books and relies on
them for a foundation. Prior to this, my
books could be read independently without the reader needing too much
information from the companion novels.
It also involves a half dozen stories weaving in and out of the main
plot, which is a radical divergence from my last book, Artificial Gods,
where the majority of the story rested in the hands of my main character.
4-When you begin a
story do you start with character or plot?
I tend to start with the plot and the
characters move in. My first novel, We Shadows, came about because I had
this vague outline for a story I would like to read about how strange things
happen around us all the time and we are conditioned not to acknowledge
them. It was little more than hollow
world-building. After a few dozen pages
of notes, one of my friends killed himself.
Partly to cope with this, I wrote a story about a girl confronting her
boyfriend’s suicide and submitted this to the local newspaper’s short story
contest. It wasn’t selected – little
wonder when they wanted stories about cheerfulness and cowboys – but I was a
little too fond of my poor, sad protagonist Shane to just let her go. The moment I decided that she would star in
the book that became We Shadows, it
began to gel.
5-Tell us about your
latest/upcoming release. What inspired it?
My most recent novel is Artificial Gods, which occurs the summer between We Shadows and Danse Macabre to previously minor characters. In involves Jasmine Woods, a young woman who
returns to her hometown for summer break between her junior and senior
year. Her first night home, she sees a
UFO and soon realize that this phenomenon is following her around and might
have been a component of her life far longer than she could have imagined.
In part, it came about because my friends took
an interest in a town nearby called Pine Bush, reputed to be home to UFOs and
aliens. We read up on what was supposed
to happen there, we watched documentaries, and we would make infrequent trips
to drive around while looking at the sky.
It was mostly harmless fun, twenty-somethings from suburbia trying to
feel daring from behind a dashboard.
When I began writing Artificial Gods, I decided that thrill-seeking voyeurism would not
suffice. If I were going to write this
book properly, I would need more information that could be gleaned in books
with bug-eyed aliens on the cover. I
attended several meeting of the United Friends Observers Society (yes, the
acronym is UFOS) to understand that this phenomenon was all about on a personal
and individual level. I tried to see it
through the eyes of Jasmine, this skeptic who is more terrified to believe than
she is of a supernatural occurrence stalking her. I even went on a few sky-watches with some of
the members, though I can’t admit to having seen anything more exciting than
planes on the horizon.
Blurb:
All Jasmine wanted was a calm summer in Pine Bush. When she sees a UFO
her first night home from college, she is willing to brush it off as
swamp gas reflected off Venus, until two men arrive at her door to
harass her into silence about a picture she did not take. Soon she
realizes Men in Black may be the least of her worries and that
ignoring the Grays and their plans for her will only embolden them. If
she doesn't figure out why she is so interesting to aliens, Men in
Black, and a mysterious man who seems to brush off harm, she may not
01: Roswell
Jasmine Woods phoned home,
wondering when her parents would pick her up from college. Her dorm was packed.
Except for the boxes on which she sat, it seemed foreign to her. No, worse, her
room should have been familiar but
now reminded her of nothing so much as a cage. She felt a claustrophobia she
recalled only from dreams, of being trapped, immobile, somewhere too bright.
Chrys answered and assured
Jasmine. "The 'rents are on their way. You must chill if you don't want
your heart to explode before you're twenty-one."
Her parents arrived within
the hour. After loading her worldly goods into the back of her father's car,
Jasmine fell into a deep sleep, losing an hour to the hum of the engine.
She awoke just outside of
Pine Bush, Jasmine's home since before Chrys was born. Passing the Cup and
Saucer Diner, Jasmine swore she saw her sister in the embrace of a scruffy man
and felt protectiveness flare through her chest, but her mother turned too
quickly for confirmation. Chrys had not seemed too keen on boys when last
Jasmine saw her, to the latter's relief. A semester apart was not likely to
change that.
Jasmine unpacked in her
bedroom, feeling like a visitor in the only home she could remember. She was a
year away from graduation, an adult in her own right. But all through dinner
that night, as she stared across at Chrys's vacant seat, Jasmine could not
shake the feeling someone had abducted the softness of childhood and in its
place implanted a stinging nettle.
After dinner, Jasmine flipped
through her address book, leaving messages she couldn’t hope would be heard
until someone answered her call. Kathleen was not someone Jasmine liked
especially—a sharp-featured girl with ears like a mouse, who seemed to have
grown this odd look to suit her personality. But time with Kathleen had to be
better than staring at her ceiling on this first day of summer break.
Jasmine met Kathleen at the
diner for dessert and distraction. Kat was no different from the day they had
graduated, seemingly frozen in time both mentally and physically. She told
Jasmine she remembered her as so beloved by boys that she could hardly swat
them away fast enough. It wasn’t true, as far as Jasmine thought, but it felt
relaxing to be someone else’s myth.
They talked
frivolously, Jasmine catching up on all the local gossip she never really cared
about but which ruled her friend's life. Jasmine's only interruption was in
asking whether Kat knew if Chrys were dating anyone.
"What do you
care?"
"I don't. It's
just... I guess I wondered."
"I don't know. I only
keep up with people a bit more mature. Plus, she's your sister. Why wouldn't you know?" Kathleen asked, seeming
almost affronted.
"She's a kid, like you
said," Jasmine said. "We don't really have much to talk about. We're
barely on the same planet."
Jasmine arrived back home
after midnight, swearing to start fresh tomorrow and see if her other social
accounts had gained interest in her absence. She mounted the stairs, noting the
darkness in every room. Her parents must have gotten more boring in her
absence. She nestled into her bed, and then noticed the faint glow from beneath
her window shade. She opened it and saw something hovering over her backyard,
the lawn tapering into a vast field of wild wheat. Without consciously willing,
she pulled her clothes back on and tiptoed down the staircase, taking pains to
mask her footfalls, as she had not on the way up.
She slunk around the corner,
seeing the object in the sky for only a moment. The fiery afterimage stained her vision. As though it sensed it had been spotted, it tipped to one side and extinguished all
lights. When her eyes adjusted, she could not find anything in the sky, no
absence of stars that could justify what she had seen.
Jasmine exhaled slowly, and she decided it was an
atmospheric phenomenon of which she knew little. She thought she had heard
about swamp gas or will-o'-the-wisp. Pine Bush surely had enough rotting
vegetation to make this a possible, if not likely, explanation.
In her ignorance, she felt there was ample room to
explain away whatever had just been in the sky. It was nothing she should let
worry her, she decided.
As she turned to go in, whispering to herself to
relax and forget, she smacked into a yielding obstacle. She jumped back,
flailing, smacking the boy several times as her fight-or-flight response became
confused from the collision.
She knocked him to the grass. "Who the hell are
you?"
"Dylan," he
answered, making no effort to rise, as though he had meant to be on the ground
this whole time. "You?"
"Jasmine."
He seemed flustered for only
a breath. "Chrys's sister? I've heard some about you. It's nice to meet
you."
"I've heard nothing about you. What are you doing in
my backyard?"
He raised his eyebrows, both
as indication of direction and incredulousness. "I guess the same thing
you are."
"What do you mean?"
she asked, feeling suddenly defensive.
"The UFO. You saw it
too. I watched you."
Jasmine backed up as though
these words were blows from a bat. "What are you talking about? I don't
know what I just saw."
"And it was flying.
Which is why we call them Unidentified Flying Objects." He gave her a warm
smirk that only irritated her further, as she knew this must have been how he
charmed Chrys. He wore an Xir T-shirt, a local band made good that Jasmine
managed to not dislike, and jeans that were not artfully frayed as much as left
to utter disrepair. Around his neck hung a pair of expensive-looking binoculars
Jasmine briefly worried she had broken in shoving him.
"Wait, you were sitting
in my backyard looking for UFOs?" Jasmine asked. “You didn’t break
anything, right?”
Dylan finally rose from the
ground and began to brush grass from his clothes, checking the lenses of his binoculars for damage. "Nothing that can’t be
brushed off. Chrys told me it was okay."
"Why here?"
Dylan crinkled his brow as he looked up from the lenses. "Seriously? UFOs love Pine Bush. This place is like sugar to ants."
"You believe in aliens?"
she asked as though he had admitted to eating these ants.
He shrugged. "I don't
know what I believe yet, but there are
UFOs. You just saw one."
"Maybe it was light off
a cloud. We are directly on the flight path of Stewart Air Force Base, you
know."
He nodded absently. "I
do, actually, know that. I just think it's kind of cool, you know? That this is
the Roswell of the Northeast. Mostly, though, I think the people here are
hilarious. I've never been anywhere with
better people-watching capabilities."
Jasmine crossed her arms over
her chest. "I don't think my neighbors would be happy with you laughing at
them."
He loosely brushed errant
strands of his hair back with his fingers and gave what she assumed to be an
apologetic smirk. He seemed like the sort to have a vast arsenal of smirks,
shaped over a decade of nonverbal conversation.
"You really didn't know
about the UFOs in Pine Bush, did you?"
"Of course not!"
"Why do you think the
diner is the Cup and Saucer?" he asked, pointedly, one eyebrow raised.
"That's reaching. It's
obviously after a tea saucer, not a flying one. Anyway, I think you should get
out of here before my gun-toting father comes out to investigate all the
noises."
Dylan looked up at the dark
windows, angling his eyes exactly on Jasmine's parents' bedroom window. "Fine,
I'll see you."
As she showed him to the yard’s
edge, the object returned. In the glow of the two streetlights, there was no
question this was not a cloud. Smooth and metallic, the silent triangle hovered
fifty feet above their heads. Jasmine could hear nothing but her heart pounding
in her ears and Dylan's breath coming in even gasps. There were no crickets
chirping, no frogs singing their pickup lines. The object tipped toward them again as if to get a better look. Jasmine thought she could
see small windows and behind the windows were—
There came a bright flash.
Within a blink, the object had vanished to nothingness as though it had been nothing more than a fancy.
Jasmine's breath returned in
shallow bursts. She fell onto the grass, hyperventilating and weakened by her
inability to reconcile. Dylan sat beside her and rubbed her back, tentatively
and kindly, until her breathing normalized. She wished she had remembered to
put her bra back on before coming outside again, but she did not wish to call
attention to this by rejecting appreciated comfort.
"We need to call the
police," Jasmine said when she felt she had air enough to spend on words.
He laughed without malice. "And
tell them what exactly?"
"That we... We saw
a...an object."
"The spotters see them
all the time. The cops don't care. I don't think the ship broke any earthly
law. On the other hand, it is a misdemeanor to 'sky watch' in this county."
She looked to him, accepting
this as an unfortunate probability. "So what do we do?"
"Nothing. It's all we can do."
Dylan helped Jasmine onto her
feet and led her to the front door. She had no more words for him, not even a "thanks"
or "goodnight." She locked the door behind her. Once in her room, she
pulled the sheets over her head as though to evade a monster under her bed and wished without success for the blankness of sleep.
***
Jasmine willfully forgot enough
details by morning that what had
happened last night barely bothered her. A voice
within her assured her it was always best to forget about anything that varied
from the world she knew. The sooner she let this slip from her mind the better.
She had a
coworker, not a friend, barely an acquaintance at college who was obsessed with
the paranormal at the expense of acknowledging the unflattering normal that
ruled his life. Spookiness might keep him occupied, but it was tedious to her.
What had happened last night did not bear further thought. It must have been a
waking dream caused by her being so tired as to be suggestible. It had to be
explicable, even if she were not presently in a position to explain it.
Chrys came down the stairs in
tie-dyed pajamas, bobbed hair bouncing, and a broad smile across her thin lips.
Though growing into her prettiness at a glacial pace, Chrys had been composed
almost entirely of recessive traits. While Jasmine's hair was silky brown,
nearly black, and pin straight to the middle of her back, her sister had a
bramble of strawberry-blonde curls that had been cut close since she was an
unkempt girl and their mother had gotten tired of trying to comb out Gordian
knots. Chrys looked like a dandelion, a thin stem leading to fluff. Even her
nose was petite. Her eyes were burnished steel to Jasmine's verdure, though
Chrys made up in ocular size what she lacked in style. Jasmine reasoned some
man out there might want a lemur-eyed puffball, but hoped it would not be any
time soon. She still prayed the puberty fairy would one day visit her little
sister with a figure, but it seemed less likely with every day that elapsed.
"So, I met a guy at the
Cup and Saucer last night..." Chrys said in lieu of "good morning"
as she prepared her cornflakes.
"Yeah, I noticed."
Chrys paused midcrunch, the
bolus of her breakfast on presentation. "Wha?"
"Your boyfriend was
lurking in our backyard last night."
"Oh," Chrys said,
slicing a banana in the mush her cereal was becoming. "He's not my
boyfriend."
"But you want him to be."
She swallowed her mouthful. "I
dunno... Why were you in the backyard?"
"I heard a noise. He was
there. I told him dad would shoot him. He left."
Chrys laughed and pointed a
near-full spoon at Jasmine. "Dad is the least violent guy ever, despite
the guns."
"Dad might change his
tune if he knew strangers lurked in the backyard."
"Not likely... What did
Dylan say about me?" Chrys asked, leaning forward.
"That you gave him
permission to be there. And you told him about me. That's all."
"Oh." Her smile
dropped. "He's coming to pick me up in an hour."
"Where are you two
going?" Jasmine asked over her yogurt out of a duty to conversation.
"Driving, I guess. Maybe
to New Paltz, check out some of the shops."
"And you met him yesterday?"
Chrys rolled her eyes. "Yeah,
so?"
"Your funeral."
Chrys dumped the remaining
cereal in the sink, the soggy flakes clogging the drain. Jasmine finished her
yogurt and did not give Chrys the satisfaction of a reaction. Then, with a
clenched jaw, she cleared out the sink and washed her sister's bowl.
Chrys galloped down the
stairs when the doorbell chimed. She was freshly showered, smelling of orchids,
honey, and patchouli. She wore an overlarge Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt
that had once belonged to their mother, though Chrys had cut off the collar to
expose a bony shoulder. Her jeans were so ripped as to provide far less
protection from the elements than shorts would have.
Jasmine got to the door
first, glancing backward to stick her tongue out at her sibling. "Dylan,
come in."
Chrys tried to get in front
of her and out the door. "No, really, we have a big day ahead of us and—"
"You don't, Chrys, and I
want to make sure Dylan will keep you safe."
Dylan subdued the argument by
walking between the sisters and flouncing onto the living room couch.
Jasmine sat across from him in a dark-blue chair. In
the light of day, she could almost see what her little sister found appealing
about him. Tendrils of brown hair escaped his loose ponytail and framed his
tanned, long face peppered with two days' growth of beard. One could almost say
Dylan took "devil may care" to an art, except art needs to be
practiced, and he gave the aura of obliviousness toward any effort. If he knew
he was in for an interrogation, his demeanor gave no indication. If anything,
he telegraphed gratefulness to be off his feet, as though he had worked all day
in the fields, and this was his first chance to sit. He occupied the maximum
amount of space he could on the sofa, the knees of his torn jeans spread wide
in a posture that would be immodest were he a woman.
Chrys sat next to him, shot
her sister a look, and then nestled closer. Dylan seemed likewise indifferent
to this increase in physical closeness, but it was not for him that Chrys
cuddled.
"Where are you taking my
sister?" Jasmine began.
He studied her for a moment. "Is
that the question you want me to answer?"
"That's why I asked it."
"Because you are her mom
proxy?" he asked not snidely, as Jasmine would have were she offering the
question.
"No, because I'm her
sister, and I care about her welfare."
Dylan, despite the near
amoebic levels of comfort he seemed to be experiencing, relaxed farther into
the sofa. "No, I don't think that's what this is. I walked into some
sibling rivalry, am I right?"
Chrys rolled her eyes and
nodded.
"Thought so. We're just
going to drive around, enjoy this day, carpe our diem. You are welcome to join
us as a chaperone if that's really what you're into."
Chrys pulled away and shook
her head such that her hair nearly sparked with its newfound static. "No,
she isn't welcome. She's absolutely not
coming."
"You don't want me
there, Chryssy?" she asked, calling her the nickname she disliked almost
as much as her given name and offering a mockery of a pout.
"No, Jazzy, I don't,"
Chrys said, responding in kind.
Dylan interrupted their
battle of eyebrows and flared nostrils. "I do. You should come. I can
entertain two Woods girls as easily as one."
Both sisters let out a sigh
of disgust, their expressions twins even if their faces were far from. Dylan
did not react to this, either.
With no more questions,
having felt she somehow lost this skirmish, Jasmine let this boy take off with
her sister. She assumed Chrys must have a brain in her head, but it did not appear to be one that contained common sense.
When she returned to the
living room, she saw a new book on the coffee table, a hardcover emblazoned
with the words Silent Siege, below
which glared a drawing of half an alien's
face, its black, almond-shaped eye shining. Jasmine sniffed and brought this lover's token
up to her sister's room, throwing it on her bed before its incense ghost could
haunt the rest of the house.
02: Men in Black
Jasmine spent her afternoon
trying to summon forth company of the non-Kathleen kind before her parents
eventually returned home from their respective jobs and put her to work on
chores. She guessed most of her friends, the casual acquaintances to the ones
who she truly missed, were spending their summers far from Pine Bush. She
considered it her own fault for not keeping in touch. She had spent the last
two summers hopping from one summer program to another to circumvent
requirements at Annandale, ignoring old friends as she was now ignored. Still
if someone didn’t rescue her soon, she was doomed to a dull summer.
Around two in the afternoon, someone
knocked on the door, three perfect sets of raps like a clockwork woodpecker
soliciting entrance. Jasmine glanced through the peephole and saw two men in
stiff black suits. Behind them, distorted by the fisheye lens, she saw a black
Cadillac. The Jehovah's Witnesses certainly upped the ante.
She opened the door a crack,
leaving the security chain in place. "Sorry, we already have a savior and
we aren't accepting solicitations, but thanks for coming by."
Jasmine slammed the door, but
it didn’t close. She looked for what was blocking it and saw four pallid
fingers like maggot sausages squeezed between the door
and the frame. Immediately, she slid the chain free and opened the door so the
fingers could be liberated. The front-most man slowly retracted his hand and
put it at his side. "You are going to let us in."
"What? Yes, yes, of
course! I'm sorry about your hand. I didn't see it there."
Both men nodded in unison and
walked into her house. There was something about the way each moved that
reminded Jasmine of a cheap wind-up soldier she had been given as a little
girl, its parts never quite moving in a sensible way. It was as though these
men had not grown up with joints and were uneasy about using them now.
The men sat on the couch. The
short one fumbled with a curling wire projecting from behind his ear. Jasmine
wondered why a Jehovah's Witness would need that, but then decided it must be
for an old hearing aid, though the man was too young to need one. Or was he? It
was difficult to settle on an age for either man. Certainly older than her, but
in no specific way.
"Let me get you some
ice," Jasmine offered.
"Ice?" asked the
taller man. "Yes. Ice. You will get us ice now."
Jasmine dashed into the
kitchen and placed some ice cubes in a Ziploc bag, covering this in a paper
towel. How much more than this would be required for mashing some religionista's
hand in her door? It was mostly his fault for putting it there. She would
accept a copy of The Watchtower and
pretend to care for a few minutes, but then they were out of there.
She returned and asked to see
the injured man's hand.
"Yes. Let us show our
hands," the man said. Both men stuck their arms out, palms up. Jasmine
pursed her lips at this strangeness and reached out for the injured man's left
hand. His fingers were long and pale, cool to the touch. The skin around the
knuckles was torn but bloodless, and for a moment, Jasmine thought she saw
something more beneath the torn skin, something silver or gray. The man
retracted his hand to his side.
"What is this?" the
other man demanded, looking up at her with his mouth half opened. His eyes were
dark and unblinking, the irises almost black.
"It's ice. For your
friend's hand."
"Yes," said the
first man, matching Jasmine's cadence. "It's ice. For your friend's hand."
The two men took the bagful
of ice and after a cursory examination, disassembled it on the coffee table
into its components: ice, plastic bag, and paper towel. Then they began to put
each, in turn, into their mouths. Jasmine backed away from them. Their
attention returned to her. Both of their mouths were opened now, a sliver of
paper towel sticking to the bottom lip of the smaller man.
"I think you two should
leave now. My parents will be back any minute, and my father might shoot you."
"The only functional
firearm in this house is locked in a case five meters from you," the first
one said as though he were trying to mimic the robot from a fifties sci-fi
movie. He flashed a badge, but all she could recall once he had put it away was
that it was an inverted seven-pointed star with letters between each prong, but
no notion remained of which. "We are from your government. We have
questions."
"Then you should talk to
my parents."
"If you want to see your
parents alive, you will answer our questions," the smaller one said. "I
am Ensign Donald and this is Vice Admiral Erikson. You will answer our
questions."
Jasmine sat, though her
instinct was to run. Donald removed a device from his jacket pocket, a small
gray box with lights, and put it on the table between them. "What do you
know about UFOs?"
Jasmine wanted to leave the
room, to lock herself somewhere until they left, but found herself answering, "I
don't know anything. People see them. I've never been interested."
Erikson jumped to his feet,
shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back as though about to
topple. "The most important subject in the universe and you are not
interested?"
She shook her head. "They
were always beneath my radar."
Donald leaned forward at the
waist, his gaze transferred from Jasmine to a blank spot on the table. "You
will give us all of your radar readings and your machinery now."
"I don't have… It's a
figure of speech."
Donald unbent himself and
looked at her. He tore a piece of plastic bag free and began chewing it, his
mouth remaining opened and only his bottom jaw moving.
"You did not see
anything last night," Erikson insisted.
"I didn't," Jasmine
said.
"You took a photogram of
what you did not see last night. You will give this to me now," Donald
said, the plastic bag gone from his mouth and the ice melted to a puddle. He
turned his head sharply, up, down, side to side, and then back to her. "Jasmine
Woods, you cannot hide your thoughts from us. We are from the center of your
planet. You did not see anything last night. You will come with us in our transport
vehicle, and you will show us where it was."
Erikson reached for her.
Jasmine pulled away and Erikson moved back into position. He picked a coin up
from the table and held it to her. Then he closed his hand around it and opened
it a moment later, empty. "Just as this coin is no longer in this
dimension, your heart...will not...be if...you...tell...an...y...one ab...out
this. Discharging! Discharging! We need to speak to your sister! Bornless, she
has no head! Perform the Star Sapphire. Bring the moon! Ka ka ka ka ka,"
he said like a cheap electronic toy frying its circuit board.
Donald then sang "Mary
Had a Little Lamb" in a falsetto, but skipped back to the beginning after
one and a half verses with the hiccup of a broken record. Both men rose and with
their awkward gait, hobbled out of the house again without another word.
Jasmine looked out the window and saw another man in a black suit standing at
the far door of the car, staring back at her. He was about seven feet tall, but
the suit seemed tailored for someone a foot shorter. They all entered the car—none
in the driver's seat—and it sped off.
***
When she was sure they were
gone, she called Chrys's cell phone, and when that failed, called Kathleen and
told her to come pick her up.
"What's wrong?"
Kathleen asked.
"Nothing. I don't know.
Can you drive me to New Paltz?"
"Um, sure, I guess. When
is good?"
Jasmine looked down at her
watch, startled her interaction with these men had taken so long. "Three.
I just need to get some stuff ready."
There was a pause on the
other end. "In the morning?"
"What? No."
"I don't understand. You
want to go to New Paltz tomorrow?"
"No, in like fifteen
minutes."
Again, the pause. "So, five o'clock, then?"
Jasmine looked down at her
watch, then to the clock on the mantle for confirmation. She peered out the
window at the sunlight. "One second." She turned the television on to
the Weather Channel, which stated the time as 4:44.
Thomm Quackenbush is a novelist, essayist, and teacher in the Hudson
Valley. He has been previously published by Cave Drawing Ink, The
Journal of Cartoon Over-Analysis, Broken City, and Paragon Press. He
is the webmaster of http://xenex.org, where is posts his writing. He
hardly ever touches ghosts anymore, despite what his books may insist.
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